triple j magazine

triple j's monthly take on music and alternative culture. With lots of behind-the-scenes action, bringing airwaves straight to you!

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Portugal. The Man

This Portland-via-Alaska outfit won us over with 'Got It All (This Can't Be Living Now)' from their sixth album, In the Mountain in the Cloud. Samantha Clode caught up with frontman John Baldwin Gourley before he hit Australia for the Laneway Festival — check out the rest of their chat in the February issue of triple j mag.

So you've been eating something dodgy…We just left England and are now in France; we're playing Paris tomorrow. So tonight we got dinner at this restaurant, and Ryan [Neighbors, keyboards] ordered this sausage… and he cut it open and took a bite and it was like intestines. It was a proper sausage. I'm fairly certain this meat was off, it was so rancid. I was laughing at him, because it's just… French food. I cut it open and it was the worst foul smell (laughs). It ruined everybody's dinner and we just ended up [getting fast food]. It was horrible, so bad!

Keep away from the meat. You're on your sixth album: is it strange to still be getting discovered in new territories, like down here in Australia? Or does it feel like a natural progression? How has the UK been?Everything's been going really good. The UK has been the hardest for us, only because we only recently started coming over here. We've been to Europe a lot: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Amsterdam. We've done a lot of work in those areas but not as much in the UK. It's kinda cool, 'cause it feels like we're taking years of steps back each time (laughs). I feel like every time I get on stage in England it's our second show ever and I'm just trying not to fall apart on stage.

I'm guessing none of you have been to Australia?We've never been; we're all pretty excited. More than anything, this band has been about working and trying to play as many shows as we can. So [six albums] has been more about documenting the growth of a band and documenting every step of the band's path. It's been cool. I feel like every time we make a record it's our first album. I was a carpenter from Alaska, and I always loved music. My dad built houses, so I just went and did that with him, 'cause I have fun with that as well. I like art and architecture.

This is your first major label record. Did that change the parameters for you?To be perfectly honest about the deal we did with Atlantic, it was more about: Did we feel ready to make this record? Did we feel ready to have people's eyes on us that we didn't have before? We actually said no for about eight months before we signed, because we wanted to play as much as we could. I'm a huge Beatles fan, and you hear the stories about them playing something ridiculous — like 10,000 hours before they put out their first record. In Hamburg they would play eight, 10 hours a day, perfecting what they did. The George Harrison documentary [Martin Scorsese's Living in the Material World] is really amazing — have you seen that? You hear him talking about when he first met John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and John was playing on a guitar with only four strings. John had no idea that you even played with six strings, he just wanted to play music. He was still learning. George came in as the guy who knew music, so he taught them chords. We always talk about these things. We just want to play as many shows as we can. We've played almost 1000 shows at this point — I think we're at 900 so far. But the reality is music is more of a trade than anything, in my opinion. There are definitely different schools, but we always talk about practice.